<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"><FONT SIZE=2>In a message dated 6/11/01 6:51:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
<BR>RowanwaldCentral@msn.com writes:
<BR>
<BR>
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">I read an interesting list of ages at death of some well-known medieval
<BR>persons, and thought you'd be interested. We all know that the life
<BR>expectancy was considerably lower than in modern times, but I, for one, need
<BR>a reminder that it didn't mean it was lead to the perception of as "being
<BR>old" at 45 (except in the minds of teenagers and children, of course! )
<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>In a private conversation I had with the late Dr. D. Gordon Teal of Teallach,
<BR>Baron of Huntly (mundane Baron), who was working on his PhD thesis on a small
<BR>medieval English town (forgive me if I can't forget which one), we discussed
<BR>this very topic. A large part of his research was examining the vellum
<BR>sheets where the death records were kept. These records could tell him a lot
<BR>about the people in the village, household possessions, general health, etc.
<BR>
<BR>He talked about the myth that people in the Middle Ages lived to 35 or 45
<BR>then died. What he found were lots of people dying in infancy, or before the
<BR>age of 5. But if you made it into your teen years, most people, he said,
<BR>lived into their 70s, just like today. It was just the lage number of people
<BR>who did not make it to their teen years that caused the "average" lifespan to
<BR>be 35 or so. Remember, it is just an average. But to think of an Middle
<BR>Ages where no one lived past their 40s would be an incorrect image.
<BR>
<BR>BTW, he said that these death records for the village usually fit on one
<BR>peice of vellum per year, with maybe 10 to 20 deaths. But when he came to
<BR>one year in the 14th century, andsaw an entire sheet filled with names, then
<BR>picked it up and found that it was sewn to another sheet, and another, and
<BR>yet another, etc., in accordian fashion, he realized this was the year the
<BR>Black Death hit that village. He read out all of the hundreds of names, and
<BR>said he literally wept for all of those people. Even though he had studied
<BR>the plague, it had never hit him like that before.
<BR>
<BR>Aye,
<BR>Eogan
<BR>
<BR>Tighearn Eoghan Og mac Labhrainn, OPE, CP
<BR>Sacred Stone Pursuivant
<BR>Web Master et A&S Minister, Hawkwood
<BR>sennechie na hAlba agus Atlantia
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